Ad Fontes Media is proud to announce its first extensive multi-analyst content ratings research project! Since the first Media Bias Chart was launched, people have been asking for more data and transparency about the news source ratings. Within the next two weeks, we are kicking off a project to provide exactly that. During this project, we will be performing ratings of nearly 2,000 individual articles and TV news shows, which will be conducted by 20 dedicated, trained analysts having political viewpoints from across the spectrum. Once the research project is completed, we will publish the results via an interactive version ...Read more

A common complaint of President Trump and others in the GOP is that a high percentage of media coverage of him is “negative.” The official GOP Twitter account often tweets about this, sometimes citing a statistic from a Harvard study stating that over 90% of media coverage of Trump is negative. This, the President and his allies complain, is evidence of bias. In this post I argue that “negative” coverage itself isn’t necessarily “biased,” and is often perfectly fair. However, it is often easy to confuse negativity and bias, and it is similarly easy for them to overlap within the ...Read more

BuzzFeed News just came out with a big story entitled "President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Project," which has been disputed by the Special Counsel's office. Whenever a single major news org reports a big, exclusive, consequential story, which is not shortly verified by other major outlets, it is best to reserve judgment on its veracity for about a week. Other news outlets (i.e., BuzzFeed’s competitors and colleagues) are doing the work to find out exactly what happened. This is the great thing about the media ecosystem—everything is instantly peer reviewed. This ...Read more

Are you interested in becoming an analyst for the Media Bias Chart Project? We are currently recruiting analysts for the next phase of the project, which will run for about 10 weeks in early 2019. Applications are due December 8, 2018, at 11:59 pm MST. We are looking for a diverse group of individuals with differing political views to be part of our team. The main qualifications we are looking for are 1) excellent reading comprehension skills 2) excellent analytical skills, and 3) in-depth knowledge of contemporary US political issues. Analysts will be paid as independent contractors, and will receive ...Read more

Day-after-election coverage is especially useful for differentiating news content on both the quality and bias metrics. This is because election stories are naturally full of concrete facts--who won, who lost, where, and by how much. Further, the facts by themselves are fairly easy for most people to interpret without having someone else analyze them and give you their take on what they mean. Winning is generally good, and flipping a seat is even better. Losing is generally bad, and having your seat flipped is worse. Winning by more than expected, or losing by less than expected, are also good--everyone can ...Read more

USA Today, which has an overall source rating on the Media Bias Chart of “Neutral, Fact-Reporting,” published an Op-Ed written by President Trump yesterday that was widely panned by other news sources and on social media. The op-ed itself was analyzed and fact-checked by an article in the Washington Post the same day, which explained how many of the statements in the op-ed were misleading or inaccurate. USA Today got so much media peer pressure that today it actually published its own analysis, in partnership with FactCheck.org, which came to similar conclusions to the Washington Post article. According to Ad ...Read more

I'm always impressed with the comments I get from so many of you about the most difficult questions the Media Bias Chart brings to mind. These include questions like"what constitutes the left-to right spectrum?" and "how can we really evaluate sources, in a consistent, data-driven, meaningful way?" Maxwell Stearns, Professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, has written extensively on the subject of dimensionality and related topics that make his analysis of these questions especially valuable. For some weekend reading that is especially enjoyable to News Nerds like me, check out his post! https://www.blindspotblog.us/single-post/2018/09/13/The-Newest-Viral-Media-Graphic?message_id=c42de05d-1830-4420-9e21-9125e849f382

It’s a bad thing that many Americans live in alternate realities from each other based on the news sources they read and watch. The headlines below are all about essentially the same subject matter—the same events of the past few days--yet they vary wildly in their focuses and conclusions. I believe this is why we seem to be in a period of intractable polarization. Some of these contain more facts than others. Some have better analysis and better arguments than others. On the other hand, some contain more opinion and conjecture than others. Some have more hyperbole and extreme characterizations ...Read more

One new ranking on Media Bias Chart 4.0, added upon request by many commenters, is Wonkette. It’s in the bottom left corner of the chart. Apparently those at Wonkette were so displeased by this ranking that they wrote this article--Wonkette is Fake News Like Louise Mensch, According to World’s Best Fucking Chart-- about it, which employed most of the factors that resulted in its low ranking in the first place. It was the first story on their page for most of today, which is, um…flattering, I suppose? I proceeded to get lots of opinions from Wonkette’s readers about how my ...Read more